måndag 22 februari 2016

Our Foundry here in Stockholm was established back in 1943 and runs 3 generations deep.

All the same 1940's tooling frames and owen are still in use.

All our trees are from the finest Manganese Bronze Alloy and comes from hand shaped sand molds

- produced separately, one by one...

Grow your own.

Opening the molds is the best part.

Here's 110 pounds of Manganese Bronze Alloy and one of our fork covers sand molds, we did the wood pattern for our covers back in 2012, alot of thought went into making these - visually they come out identical to the old ones BUT are reinforced at all critical places and also with every internal radius improved to guarantee maximum milage without cracking.

After breaking the molds we cut out the runners and glass blast the trees to make them ready for quality control - any tree that dosen't come out 100% gets melted down again and poured into the next mold.

There you have it - one of our bottom trees cleaned up, inspected and ready for machining.

måndag 1 februari 2016

I rode a Vard on this bike for +4 years now and when me and John decided to fabricate a complete Telescopic front end the first question was simple; do we need to upgrade any of the parts on it? - However the question was just as simple

…No!

Why? - Because
the Vard front end rides and handles better than any other front end I’ve ever
ridden (which might not say all that much since I never owned anything newer
than 1957) but the original performance of these forks sure doesn’t need to be improved,
at all. Check out the sand mold of the fork covers, to the right in the photo is 110 pounds of pure manganese bronze.

Hey did you hear about Vardhalla INC building brand new Telescopic Forks in Sweden?

...Man that's so 7 hours ago.

1700 degrees - party time!

Ok I'm back! Here are our brand new Vardhalla sliders, please note the weld - we concentrate
on making the welds look authentic and just a bit gnarly, like the originals.

As a bonus here’s 2 photos of both the interior and exterior of the original Vard INC plant located on 2981 East
Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena California.

And here’s
a little weapon of mass production I did today to locate the first coordinate of the trees.

This is
where the whole machining process starts – after locating the first coordinate we trace every hole in both trees from this exact mark, and we do it using a steel compass and calipers,
not one single digital thing is involved...

CNC
machining would take the fun out of the whole process so we fabricate every
part manually by hand on 1940’s equipment.

lördag 30 januari 2016

The foundry who casted our trees was established back in 1943 and runs 3 generations deep, they still use the same 1940's tooling frames and owen.

And so our Vardhalla triple trees came out 100% identical to the 1940's originals including the tricky top surface with the diagonal 'casting stripes' - that part took a while to figure out but we couldn't be happier with the result. We started this project 30 days ago today and this is the last piece of the puzzle, now we only need to machine the trees and get ready for some final assembly.